Accounts of breakdowns are tedious. Seen from a distance—historical, geographic, administrative, or emotional distance—they make succinct stories. But in close-up view, they consist of too many details, none sufficient in itself; the pieces make sense only when considered together. “Unwinding vicious spirals,” Dark Age Ahead (p152)

Jacobs masterfully weaves the story, pulling the thread through the many facts—the only way to unwind such interlocked problems to begin to understand the mistakes and misfortunes that sparked and spurred them on.

I’d already remarked on her storytelling skill concerning When Streetcars Ruled the Streets and pretty much any description of a system of organized complexity.

In “Unwinding vicious spirals,” she begins with the Great Depression, leading us down the rest of the 20th century spiral into worse homelessness and unaffordable housing. That prolem is interlocked with many others, of course.

I can’t do her summary narrative justice in a blog post. This is the one chapter, so far, that I will claim is a must read. It’s a must read.

Then again, I’m biased, because she’s taking to task some of the unscientific thought of the zoners in my profession, as I did earlier this month.

I’m one of those strange folk who enjoy working with (and reworking) zoning codes. Jacobs shies away from solutions that are pure abstraction, like densification or smart growth. It’s in the details. Zoning deals with some of these details, wrongly, based on three assumptions:

High ground coverages are bad.

High densities (numbers of people or numbers of households per acre) are bad.

The mingling of commercial or other work uses with residences is bad.

“Unwinding vicious spirals,” Dark Age Ahead (p153)

Based on these assumptions, we wound up governing land use primarily. That’s the “primary key” to borrow from database organization terminology, around which we organize our zoning districts. I’ve mentioned movements to put form in that spot with form-based zoning. I’ve worked on form-based zoning for small portions of Grandview Heights and Grove City, here in Central Ohio. I’m well aware of some of the strengths and drawbacks to such a solution.

Jacobs advocates organizing our code around performance with a strong form component - linked almost as a visual performance standard. I’m ready for that work when it comes. I’m ready to tell you all about it. I’m just not sure anyone’s ready to listen. Maybe soon…

Projecting forward is a bit more dangerous than connecting the threads of the past, but Jacobs identifies how the pressures on single-family homeowners to get something out of their greatest asset—their homes—may mirror the path of many farm families selling out to suburban sprawl. What this looks like: turning fallow parts of homes and lots into revenue generators: renting rooms, new structures on their lots, businesses in former residences, etc. So, so little of this is allowable today.

Jane Jacobs continues her war of words on analogies, or, what I prefer to call guiding metaphors. I first mentioned her distaste for such methods in the introduction to The Death and Life of Great American Cities and that book’s chapter on “The kind of problem a city is.” Here, in “Science abandoned” in Dark Age Ahead, she uses the same analogy that I attacked - that traffic flows like water.

Temporarily divorcing scientific inquiry from its tools, Jacobs establishes four steps of the scientific state of mind, absent the jargon used in the steps of the scientific method as you employed it on your fifth grade science fair project:

1. The fruitful question
2. Frame a hypothetical answer
3. Test that answer (or observe real world tests of that question, as in social sciences)
4. Ask more fruitful questions based on findings

Technology-based “How?” questions can mess with the order a bit. The hypothesis can come after the testing and evidence. Jacobs identifies the “late-forming hypothesis” that can be a major surprise. Continual feedback, when given proper attention over the course of this inquiry, guides one to surprise, despite the entrant’s expectations.

If I can add some insight to Jacobs’ outline, sometimes the technology comes before the question. Or, as some of my favorite tech pundits have put it: “A solution looking for a problem,” referring to the Amazon Kindle. The question then becomes, “How can we use this technology?” For snappy web applications, the question becomes, “How can we monetize this?” See twitter.

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Science is abandoned because we are human. In the most formal/technical use of the word, it’s ramifications, that is, the branching out of all the consequent erring answers compounds the costs pseudoscientific answers.

We’re human. Even the scientists are. Our identities are bound up in our worldview. For scientists, they’ve invested careers and staked their authority on the prevailing scientific paradigm. This can trip up any of the steps listed above - especially when it comes to observation and data analysis from step 3. If the inquiry falters there, no good feedback results from step 4. A given branch of science stagnates.

Jacobs continues lashing out at the traffic engineers and highway builders of the 1950s. Death and Life was not enough. The myth of traffic flowing like water continues. Traffic models err.

The unquestioned assumption: traffic remains constant. If a road is closed, traffic must find other routes, increasing congestion.

Traffic planners create impenetrable models based on this error. Their “studies” perpetuate this fiction - not tested in reality.

You can see the clash in views trickles down in the comments (1, 2) about the closing of major thoroughfares to automobile traffic, including Times Square.

Traffic planning/engineering may be turning a corner. I’ve mentioned Tom Vanderbilt - chronicler of traffic planning and engineering, who has also sounded off about the Times Square closing. He also blogs. I also have great hopes for folks like Todd Litman of Victoria Transportation Policy Institute (VTPI) and Donald Shoup, author of The High Cost of Free Parking. The paradigm may be shifting.

Tomorrow, I’ll go back and look at the paradigm of my own credentialed profession as another example of a profession that’s stuck in a bad paradigm.